After a tragic incident involving a parcel falling from the sky, you’ve been given the magical superpower of a giant sticky hand stuck firmly to your character’s head. This story driven platformer guides you through the dirty home city and dream world solving minor inconveniences for the city folk and joining the main character in his bitchy hypochondria.

A nonstop barrage of cutscenes certainly gives ample opportunities to bask in the excellent voice acting, and definitely keeps the player informed as to what’s going on at every exact second. This would be acceptable in a TV show or cartoon short, but the writing is horribly dry and the terrible jokes feel incredibly forced.

As a game, there’s almost zero value in Stick it to the Man. The level design is disgustingly simple, and seems to have been a violently crude afterthought. An extreme amount of work went into the art style and I can only imagine the budget for the voice acting, but what’s the point when this is supposed to be a game? This is blatantly a cartoon crudely forced into a game for whatever reason. There’s nothing skillful or fun in the mechanics of this, no scores, no sense of accomplishment. Making this as interactive entertainment feels entirely pointless, the player serves almost no purpose and their skills are unneeded, it’s insulting.

Another unflattering platformer poorly executed and worth about the same as those quarter machine sticky hands it praises so dearly.

Stick it to the Man earns a 1 out of 5.

PROS:
– music is very good, simple ambient tracks in levels that seem to match the environments
– voice acting is possibly the best ive seen all year
– art quality is very good, lots of well done drawing and cutout shapes go well with this paper-mario/littlebigplanet theme
– character animation is very well done, as high quality as any tv show / movie
– 360 controller support

CONS:
– right stick control of sticky hand is pretty poor, other controls just feel dirty
– dialogue is pretty dry, cringey jokes, poor writing and feels very forced
– graphic style is interesting, but doesn’t feel perfected, desperately needs antialiasing.
– WAYYY too many cutscenes, theyre all terrible and just interrupt the game
– level design is completely idiotic, full of wonderful unnecessary backtracking.
– entire game is pointless fetch-item objectives.
– close up textures during cut scenes is poor, pixelated??